Monthly Archives: December 2013

Some days you wake up to a glimmer of good news in the murk of crisis-hit Spain.

The investigating judge on the Bárcenas case sent police into the PP’s headquarters on calle Genova in Madrid last night. It looks as though the bill for renovating the party HQ a few years ago matches an amount in Barcenas’s ‘double accounting’, which would strongly suggest that the PP paid for this major construction project in cash. Cash it received in illegal and undocumented donations.

Now, I’ve lived here long enough to learn that a glimmer of hope can often turn into an oncoming train in the blink of an eye. But I’m also integrated enough to be able to take whatever pleasure I can from small moments such as this.

We’re doing Christmas at home this year for the first time ever. I plan to do some non-political stuff over at the other place. Unless the king abdicates, I might not be back on here until the new year. Bon nadal, merry Christmas and Nadolig llawen to all!

As you’ll have heard by now. A referendum on Catalan independence “will be held” on November 9 2014. It will consist of two questions: “Should Catalonia be a state? And if so, should it be an independent state?”. CiU, ERC, ICV-EUiA and CUP agreed these terms. This represents a plurality of the parties in the Catalan parliament. The agreement came days before the potential collapse of the CiU government over a budget vote due next week.

The response from Rajoy was immediate: “It’s not negotiable. It won’t happen”.

Jordi Cañas of C’s (such a fitting name) maybe hinted at the unionist approach on TV3 just now: “There won’t be a referendum in November next year” he said, “there will be elections”. And as suggested here before, this is the most likely strategy of Spanish opposition to Catalan independence: deny the right to a referendum and thereby encourage the ‘other path to independence’ – elections followed by a unilateral declaration of independence. This would put Madrid in a much better position in terms of international support and negotiating power. It is, I reckon, the preferred outcome in Madrid because of how easy it would be to paint the Catalans as thoroughly antidemocratic, as well as sowing disagreement between the pro-referendum parties (Iniciativa won’t agree to a UDI as an election pledge, I shouldn’t think).

So, in short: this time next year, we’ll still be talking about what might happen.